01/05/2015

In part 2 of our discussion with David Stephenson, owner of Stephenson Strategies and a leading Internet of Things strategist, we talk about the lay of the land in the IoT, as well as some opportunities and misconceptions around the IIoT in particular. Don’t miss part 1, where we covered IoT attitudinal shifts and the power of access to real-time networked data.

David Stephenson

Wendy Toth: What do you see as the overall lay of the land in the Internet of Things?

David Stephenson: I recently came across the Moor Insights & Strategy report on Segmenting the Internet of Things. I agree in general with the four quadrants they have in there [Monitoring, Attainment, Operational, and Life]. I also think there’s some really interesting potential for a connection between the four segments of that grid.

TOTH: What’s an example of that kind of connection?

STEPHENSON: One really neat example is in building automation. An indoor lighting system networked to carbon monoxide sensors can be programmed so that if the carbon monoxide sensors detect a dangerous level of the gas, the lights will blink red constantly until everyone leaves the building. This is a relatively simple example that can literally save lives.

Another example is in the railroad industry, which I love because railroads are so symbolic of 19th century industry. But now you have railroad companies putting sensors every few miles along the track bed. One of the problems with trains is that when the bearings on a rail car lose lubrication, the bearings heat up and can actually start a fire and lead to derailments and incredible costs.

These sensors in the track can detect excess heat in the bearings. By detecting early signs of overheating, they can take that particular car off and service it at the next scheduled stop instead of waiting to find out when the train derails.

Then, if you take that example to the next step, you can imagine the application of what’s called ‘smart dust’: sensors incredibly cheap, and powered by ambient energy sources, so they can be strewn all over the place. As the price of sensors comes down, railroad companies plan to put sensors on every single wheel of every single rail car, so they get data about rail car health immediately, without that gap of a few miles between sensors.

TOTH: What do you think are some of the biggest opportunities in the Industrial IoT?

STEPHENSON: There’s this idea of being able to see everything that has happened in a way that you couldn’t before and to optimize the precision of industrial operations. Particularly with M2M [machine-to-machine] processes, where there’s no human interaction, a change in one part of the production process will automatically trigger adjustments farther along. I think this is going to lead to unprecedented precision and economy in the manufacturing process.

TOTH: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about the IIoT?

STEPHENSON: Yes, sensors are going to continue to go down in price. And yes, a lot of the things you’re working on will become even more precise over time. But people should not be deluded by the idea that they should just wait until all of this is really optimized to get into the IIoT.

The technology is sufficiently advanced now, particularly when it comes to manufacturing. You really should launch initiatives now to optimize your current processes. That will give you the experience of dealing with the IoT, dealing with this explosion of data, dealing with the benefits of predictive analytics. Then you can build on that base to make fundamental changes in the future.

But my big message is: Don’t wait! Don’t wait for everything to be fully in place, because you can enjoy so many benefits right now.

IIoT Talks is a conversation between industry luminaries and Echelon Corporation about the opportunities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Echelon's Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Toth, will share highlights of these conversations via the company blog. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to cmartell@echelon.com.

12/23/2014

It’s that time again! As the year draws to a close, it seems fitting to review Echelon’s progress and achievements during 2014.

Spoiler alert:

Our decisions and actions this past year helped propel the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to the level of general awareness, while positioning Echelon to enjoy a happy 2015.

Here are a few highlights from last year:

Partnerships and More

We greatly expanded our presence in outdoor lighting with the acquisition of Lumewave Inc., an established outdoor lighting control system provider with a strong track record in the U.S.

Echelon signed a major distribution agreement with Digi-Key, the industry leader in electronic component selection, availability, and delivery. Digi-Key is now distributing our portfolio of products—chips, modules, routers, and software—worldwide (except Japan) for the IIoT market.

We sold our grid operations to S&T AG, a publicly traded European IT systems provider with an existing focus on smart energy products and services. The sale lets us focus all our resources on becoming a key enabler in the IIoT.

Products

We introduced and demonstrated the building industry’s first multiprotocol system-on-chip (SoC), the FT 6050 system—part of Echelon’s IzoT™ platform for the IIoT. This single-chip provides reliable, cost-effective, flexible wired IP-based connectivity for communities of devices, designed to speed migration from legacy control networks to the IIoT.

We also introduced our FT 6000 Evaluation and Development Kit (EVK), aimed at developers who are creating, testing, and deploying devices and control applications for the IIoT.

We hosted demonstrations of our advanced lighting control technologies, including ‘follow-me,’ or adaptive, outdoor lighting solutions.

In conjunction with Xicato, we demonstrated a proof of concept (PoC) for Lighting 2.0: the convergence of networking, building automation, and lighting technologies.

We made 8 million additional IIoT connections in 2014, based on our chip sales.

With the acquisition of Lumewave, we welcomed Mark Keating, Lumewave’s former chief executive, as our new director of product management.

Echelon CEO and Chairman Ron Sege was named to the advisory board of McRock Capital, a venture firm that invests exclusively in IIoT companies.

Ron Sege was also inducted into the Junior Achievement (JA) of Northern California Business Hall of Fame.

Events

Echelon exhibited and demonstrated at major industry shows, including Light + Building in Germany; LIGHTFAIR International in Las Vegas; Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition in China; AHR Expo in New York; and embedded world Conference and Exhibition in Germany.

Echelon representatives spoke at a number of conferences during 2014, including the Internet of Things Global Summit at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.; the inaugural Internet of Things Developers Conference (IoT DevCon) in Santa Clara, California; the Connected Cloud Summit IoT Forum in Boston; the IHS Industrial Automation Conference in London; IBcon (Intelligent Buildings Conference) in Las Vegas; TiEcon in Silicon Valley, California; the McRock IIoT Symposium in Montreal; Mobility 2014 in Paris; and CeBIT in Hannover, Germany.

Connections

In keeping with Echelon’s single-minded focus on the IIoT, we rebranded Echelon and launched a new website in October. The effort was led by Wendy Toth, Echelon’s chief marketing officer.

We initiated an ongoing segment of the Echelon blog called ‘IIoT Talks,’ wide-ranging Q&A-style conversations between industry luminaries and Echelon about the IIoT market. IIoT Talks participants in 2014 included Chris Rommel, executive vice president of the market intelligence firm VDC Research; Patrick Moorhead, founder, president & principal analyst, and Paul Teich, CTO and senior analyst, of Moor Insights & Strategy; Scott MacDonald, co-founder of McRock Capital; Loring Wirbel, senior analyst at The Linley Group and senior editor of Networking Report; Bill Morelli, associate director of M2M and IoT at IHS Technology; Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of the strategic consulting company THINKstrategies; Jesse Foote, senior research analyst for the market research firm Navigant Research; Menko Deroos, CEO and co-founder of the innovative lighting company Xicato; and David Stephenson, a leading IoT strategist.

For some of the IIoT Talks conversations, Echelon CEO Ron Sege builds on the questions and answers by providing his own commentary, insight, advice, and other thoughts in an IIoT Talks Dialogue series.

Echelon sponsored and participated in a number of well-attended webinars during the year, focusing primarily on outdoor lighting.

Clearly, it was a busy and productive year for Echelon. We look forward to 2015 invigorated, focused, and excited about building upon our 25 years of control networking leadership to help shape the exciting world of the IIoT.

12/11/2014

In part 1 of our discussion with David Stephenson, owner of Stephenson Strategies and a leading Internet of Things strategist, we talk about IoT attitudinal shifts and the power of access to real-time networked data. In part 2, we’ll cover the lay of the land in the IoT, as well as some opportunities and misconceptions around the IIoT in particular.

Wendy Toth: As someone who has recently been named one of the IoT’s global thought leaders, what’s your take on how we should be thinking about the IoT?

David Stephenson, owner of Stephenson Strategies

David Stephenson: First of all, the IoT is equal parts technology and attitude shifts. One of the things about the IoT is that it runs contrary to many, many years of ingrained management attitudes. That’s my niche in this area: this attitudinal shift and what it requires from participants in the IoT.

TOTH: Can you talk a bit more about the nature of this attitudinal shift?

STEPHENSON: In the past, we all had this great belief that the secret to success in technology industries would be to create a proprietary system and make customers entirely dependent on us. The only firm I know of that has been able to pull this off in current times is Apple, and I’m still astounded that Apple’s been able to do that. The whole trend at this point is this shift toward open data and sharing and collaboration.

We need to start asking entirely new questions—whether it’s about behind the firewall or in conjunction with your supply chain or your distribution network or directly with your customers—regarding who else can use your data. And that is a remarkable shift.

TOTH: What do you think will be the magnitude of this shift?

STEPHENSON: I’ve heard Echelon CEO Ron Sege talk recently about network effects, in the application of Metcalfe’s Law to the IoT. And I think he’s right, except he might be being too conservative. I think there’s almost unlimited potential for network effects when it comes to the IoT, largely because of this unprecedented level of data sharing.

And I think the potential for transformation is particularly important in the Industrial IoT (IIoT), where there’s finally a possibility to overcome what I refer to as ‘collective blindness’ about anything we simply can’t observe and document, particularly not in real time. Suddenly, that blindness has been lifted with the IoT and IIoT.

TOTH: Can you give an example of what you mean about the lifting of collective blindness?

Until very recently, someone in manufacturing plants would walk around the factory with a clipboard writing down readouts from the dials and gauges on various pieces of equipment. That was as close as you could come to getting information about what was actually happening on the assembly line.

Contrast that to sophisticated manufacturing plants today, where the assembly line is equipped with thousands of networked sensors. Now, a manager walks around the factory with an iPad and has access to data from all those sensors, simultaneously and in real time.

TOTH: What can be done with that real-time data?

STEPHENSON: To start with, you can use the data to optimize production in ways never before possible. But the possibilities beyond production optimization are especially exciting.

When you have real-time access to the data from your assembly line, you can share it with your supply chain and your distribution network. This is making possible what I call the era of precision manufacturing. You can eliminate waste and streamline production.

I think it could even be a key to helping ensure jobs. Think about it. If you can share that kind of information on a real-time basis with your supply chain, doesn’t it makes sense that you would give preference to a supplier who is within an hour from your factory, as opposed to someone in China—where even with real-time information it’s going to take weeks to send you something?

So I’m very optimistic about the job creation potential with this kind of precision manufacturing, which is a direct application of the IIoT.

IIoT Talks is a conversation between industry luminaries and Echelon Corporation about the opportunities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Echelon's Chief Marketing Officer, Wendy Toth, will share highlights of these conversations via the company blog. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to cmartell@echelon.com.

11/03/2014

This is part 2 of a conversation with Wendy Toth, Chief Marketing Officer. Part 1 talked about the operational changes in rebranding Echelon to focus exclusively on the Industrial IoT market. Here, Wendy reviews the marketing changes that are part of the rebranding.

Tell us about your marketing campaign to rebrand Echelon as a leader in the Industrial IoT.

Toth: When I came to Echelon over a year ago, I focused on what I like to call “the 3 R’s”-- repositioning, rebranding and relaunching. My charter was to move the company into the Industrial Internet of Things market, build up sales enablement, create thought leadership and brand awareness, and increase end-user engagement.

My team and I articulated what makes Echelon so special and authenticated our brand story. From that work, we created a “Why Echelon” corporate video. Next, we renewed our brand-identity package and modernized the company’s 25-year-old logo. We also completely revamped the corporate website.

What did you do to help with sales enablement?

Toth: We knew that sales needed a website filled with data and resources on this new market segment called the Industrial IoT. Customers would be hungry for information and it was our job to be educators. That required us to develop a special IIoT website. We had six weeks to create a microsite for our new Industrial IoT platform launch that was being rolled out at the end of Oct 2013. On this microsite, we published case studies on customer companies that had been using our control networking technology since the Echelon’s founding, such as New York Air Brake, ID Systems, fast food kitchens like McDonald’s and naval defense systems. This microsite was a stop-gap for the overhaul and redesign of the Echelon corporate website, which was to launch later in the year.

Last December, we formed a Market Advisory Board with members of the industry coming together to evaluate our IIoT roadmap. This is an elite group on cross-industry luminaries who spend a day a quarter with us talking through our roadmap and corporate strategy.

As I mentioned, we revamped the corporate website -- a nine-month project involving web designers, website developers and programmers. We brought in a new look-and-feel for the website, modernizing the format and refreshing the pages.

What activities did you do to help create more of a buzz?

Toth: We doubled our PR effort, started participating in a number of IIoT webinars, and began speaking about IIoT at industry conferences and trade shows, such as the IEEE-SA Internet of Things Workshop in November 2013, the TIEcon 2014, The White House Smart America Initiative, IoT DevCon, The Connected Cloud Summit, McRock Capital’s 2014 IoT Summit and the 2014 IoT Global Summit.

We also started a thought-leadership blog called IIoT Talks for which we interview industry visionaries on the leading issues in the IIoT market. We have spoken with market analysts from IHS, Navigant and VDC as well as executives from Xicato, Think Strategies and McRock Capital, to name just a few.

It sounds like you have accomplished a lot in a short amount of time.

Toth: Really, what we have accomplished in a just over a year is quite remarkable. We have rebranded the company from a smart grid supplier to an Industrial IoT player. We delivered technology solutions for engineers to start developing with, and we created an industry buzz around the IIoT. In fact, we created the category itself. And yeah, we’re proud of that!

10/28/2014

Wendy, as Chief Marketing Officer, you’ve led the overall rebranding of Echelon. Tell us about the process.

Wendy Toth, Chief Marketing Officer, Echelon

Toth: We recently turned our company resources entirely toward the very compelling industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. The most visible outcome of that strategy change was to sell our grid business to S&T AG, which we announced on October 1 of this year. The sale will allow us to singularly focus on the IIoT market, rather than splitting our efforts between two markets, as we did before. We can now target our product portfolio and our entire brand on the IIoT.

The second most visible outcome of that strategy was that we acquired an outdoor lighting company called Lumewave. The acquisition brings some interesting new products into our portfolio, mainly RF and wireless products that we didn’t have. Also, we now have Lumewave’s manufacturers' reps in the United States that expands our sales channel. So today, we are able to offer customers outdoor lighting solutions for both wired and wireless capabilities and reach the North American market as well as the international market, into which we have been selling for some time.

When did you start the rebranding process?

Toth: It started in the fall of 2013 when we announced our IzoT platform, designed to accelerate the adoption of the IIoT. We released beta versions of our IzoT multi-protocol stack for the ARM architecture with example reference implementations for the popular Raspberry Pi development platform.

Then, in early 2014, we created an evaluation kit targeted at developers who are creating, testing and deploying devices and control applications for the IIoT. This IzoT-in-a-Box evaluation kit includes evaluation boards based on the FT 6050 System-on-Chip (SoC), a router to connect the FT-based device network to Ethernet, development tools to develop devices and applications on the boards, and software to commission and manage the device network.

Is the Industrial Internet of Things market new to Echelon?

Toth: Not at all. Our DNA and our core competencies have always been in the IIoT space, or what we used to call “control networking.” But when you add a little dash of IP and a little dash of cloud, control networking 2.0 becomes the Internet of Things. There are a couple of markets that we've played historically in, that are really strong, and that are emerging. You'll see Echelon’s roots in building automation, in lighting and in transportation end-to-end, that type of thing.

What’s happening in the outdoor lighting space?

Toth: The fastest-growing market segment in the IIoT is outdoor lighting on campuses: university campuses, schools, hospital campuses, corporate campuses, malls, shopping areas and so on. Lumewave has done a very good job of understanding and creating products for those markets. Some of Lumewave’s notable deployments are with the University of California campuses in Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara. California State University at Fullerton is another one. The City of San Francisco has quite a few deployments of Lumewave products, as does the VacaValley Hospital in California.

Will the building-automation market take off for Echelon with this new IIoT direction?

Toth: We think so. As you know, Echelon has had tremendous success over the years in building automation with our control networking systems supporting the LonWorks protocol. In the past 12 months, what you have seen is our shift from single-protocol support to the multiprotocol IzoT system, which is truly an enablement platform. The building automation market is looking for ways to bridge the disparate protocols on their legacy devices with today’s IP protocols. Platforms like our IzoT help building owners gracefully migrate both legacy devices and new devices into the IIoT. And our multiprotocol environment vastly reduces the R&D investments our OEMs need to make to support LonWorks, BACnet, and other protocols used in building automation.

Does Echelon compete with GE and Cisco, companies that also talk about the Industrial IoT?

Toth: We see ourselves as complementary to enabling the vision that GE and Cisco and other companies are putting out there.

Think of Echelon as sitting in the devices at the edge of the network. We talk a lot about small data being turned into big data, which is another area that you'll hear GE talk a lot about. Without small data, there is no big data. That small data is coming from the field bus devices that are at the edge of the network.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview where Toth describes the marketing changes that are part of rebranding Echelon.

10/16/2014

When Echelon acquired wireless outdoor lighting control system company Lumewave this past August, it also acquired a new director of product management: Mark Keating, Lumewave’s former chief executive.

Mark Keating

With more than 30 years of experience in electronic product development and management, Keating brings to Echelon expertise in radio frequency (RF) and wired lighting control. In his new role, Keating will introduce Lumewave customers to Echelon’s control networking technologies.

Echelon is in the process of incorporating Lumewave’s North American sales channels into its international channel, which will bring Lumewave’s individual lighting controllers, gateways, and management and maintenance software to a worldwide market for street lighting and for enterprise and commercial outdoor lighting.

Before Keating joined Lumewave as president in 2010, he spent 10 years as an executive of the facilities management company Onity, a unit of United Technologies. In 2002, Onity acquired Senercomm, where Keating had been president and CTO.

10/15/2014

McRock Capital, the Toronto venture firm that invests exclusively in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) companies, has appointed Echelon CEO Ron Sege to its Advisory Board.

“Ron has led some of the most transformative high-growth technology companies during his impressive career. His passion and industry knowledge is an incredible asset to McRock as we partner with entrepreneurs to build world-class technology companies in the Industrial Internet sector,” said Whitney Rockley, co-founder and managing director of McRock Capital. “Ron understands the massive opportunity around the IIoT and the importance of partnerships and alliances as the physical and digital collide in Industrial markets.”

Ron Sege, Echelon CEO

Board members provide business guidance and mentoring to McRock’s IIoT portfolio companies.

Sege is the sixth member of the McRock Capital Advisory Board. The other members are Marzio Pozzuoli, founder and former CEO of RUGGEDCOM, part of Siemens; Harry Zarek, Founder and CEO of Compugen Inc.; Peter Williams, CTO for IBM's Big Green Innovations Incubator; Mike Fister, CEO of Enecsys; and Peter Van Deventer, co-founder and managing partner of Integrity Global Management.

10/09/2014

Sohrab Modi, Echelon’s new CTO, will be one of two speakers on a panel entitled “Current Enabling Technologies & Challenges of the Internet of Things,” the IHS Industrial Automation Conference in London later this month.

Modi and Eddie Lee, director of global vertical industry marketing at Moxa, will provide insight about networking devices in the industrial environment.

Bill Morelli, IHS associate director - Internet of Things, will moderate the panel presentations and follow-up discussion on how suppliers and users can benefit from adopting an Industrial IoT (IIoT) strategy.

More information about the Oct. 23-24 conference is available on the IHS website.

You may also like:

Interview with Bill Morelli of IHS, IIoT Talks, part 1 and part 2 blog posts

10/01/2014

Echelon CEO Ron Sege will be the featured luncheon speaker and join a Smart Cities panel discussion at the Internet of Things (IoT) Global Summit at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Oct. 27.

Sege will present and discuss opportunities for smart cities with moderator Nigel Cameron, president and CEO of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, and fellow panelists Sokwoo Rhee, associate director of Cyber-Physical Systems at the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST); Joseph Bradley, managing director of Cisco’s Internet of Everything practice; and other industry experts.

Immediately following the Smart Cities panel at the summit luncheon, Sege will be the featured speaker.

“Buildings, streetlights, warehouses, trucks and factories: That’s where you’ll find the money to jumpstart the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT),” Sege says. His luncheon topic will be, appropriately, “Follow the Money to the Industrial IoT.”

The summit brings Echelon together with more than 200 other key stakeholders for discussions on the critical policies and commercial opportunities surrounding the IoT. Find out more information about the Oct. 27-28 event at iotsummit@forum-global.com.

09/22/2014

Echelon’s new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) joins the company with a wealth of technical and operational experience in mission-critical spaces, including areas with direct relevance to Echelon’s core expertise and target markets in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Sohrab Modi, Echelon's CTO

In fact, Sohrab Modi remarked that in many ways, being at Echelon is like going “back to the future” to his years at Novell, where the LAN networking leader faced similar issues with multiple networking protocols. Even the solution is familiar: convergence on IP.

“Echelon has a strong platform in control networking and the IIoT,” he said. “In addition to focusing on specific areas of opportunity such as building automation and lighting, I will be working to establish a robust ecosystem around the protocol-agnostic, open Echelon platform.”

In his first 90 days as CTO, Sohrab will spend time meeting with Echelon customers, partners, and OEMs, listening carefully to their needs and goals. He also plans to work closely with standards bodies. “I want to ensure that Echelon’s expertise is well represented in guiding the future specifications that will promote easy interoperability among all the devices and applications participating in the IIoT,” he said.

Before joining Echelon, Sohrab held Vice President and CTO roles at Sun Microsystems and at Huawei. His technical strategy, planning and management experience spans areas including big data, Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined networking (SDN), smart grid, mobile and cloud operating environments, and high-availability, fault-tolerant cloud systems at a very large scale.

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